My blog for LIS 9763: Social Software and Libraries

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Lesson 8: Microblogging

This weeks lesson was on the topic of Microblogging or using Facebook, Twitter, etc. to make “status updates” or short posts on our daily lives/occurrences/etc. This was another interesting topic for me as I consistently make Facebook updates on various topics to do with my life, opinions, etc. I feel that it is a good way to communicate easily/fast with family and friends. I do have a Twitter account and I have a number of friends on there but I mostly only use it to keep up to date with the many celebrities or well-known people that use their Twitter to communicate. I very rarely make a “tweet” as I mostly do that type of updating on Facebook. Furthermore, I have always found Twitter a bit more complicated than Facebook and have only just starting learning how to hashtag and use the “@” feature. Strangely enough though I learned about the “@” feature from Facebook and hash-tagging from tagging posts in Instagram.

Because I am somewhat experienced in Twitter, I chose to look at what HootSuite has to offer. I was pleasantly surprised with how much I liked it. It is very useful that it melts together on one website your Facebook account, Twitter account, LinkedIn, etc. However, the only thing is, if you have multiple social media pages (more than five) you will need to pay to put all of these on HootSuite. Either way, I liked that I could checked the Twitter updates and Facebook updates all on one page. I could see myself utilizing this in the future if I have the need to have all of my social media pages open at once.

The article by David Allen Kelly (2009) on “How your library may not be using Twitter but should” discussed the multiple ways that libraries could use Twitter. These included tweeting about current library events, being creative in tweets to gain more attention, promote materials, promote events as they happen, posting quirky or odd links, and interact with patrons. All of these methods seem very useful to me and a very efficient way to communicate with patrons who use Twitter and microblogging methods. What I find useful with twitter as well is that you can connect it to your Facebook so that it posts on both Facebook and Twitter. In a library setting this would be very productive because then the library would be posting in both areas at once and communicated with a broader audience.